AN ANATOLIAN PARADOX

a bibliophile into a militant and destructive bibliophobe.
Before he died Chapman took to tearing up and flinging
out of window the treasures he had so patiently and so
ardently collected.

Later on Lane picked his translators with more care.
He came to realise that the work of an artist can only
be rendered by an artist and not always even at that.
One book—I forget now what it was—he asked Laurence
Housman to translate. Housman, I understand, said
he would—for twenty thousand pounds!

Many, too many to enumerate, of The Bodley Head
books have been translated into various foreign tongues.
One of the latest to be thus honoured is an exquisite
version by Mademoiselle Leo Lack, of Kenneth Gra-
hame's Golden Age.

It is Shelley who, in his *Defence of Poetry', says the
last word on the subject of translation. 'Hence the
Vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into
a crucible that you might discover the formal principle
of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one
language into another the creations of a poet/ Or of
any writer of what Keats called 'distilled prose'.

I once propounded this idea to Anatole France.
'Maitre', said I, 'translation is an impossibility; there's
no such thing.'

Whereupon he said, 'To recognise that is the first
step to success. Allex-yV

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